How did people work out that sex can = baby???

[TweeBee]

Just pondering this with DH and thought some wise MNers might know.
So presumably in early human history, not everyone who had unprotected sex became pregnant, like now. However the earliest sign of pregnancy is missing a period which would be maybe 2 weeks after sex during a fertile period and how aware were early humans of the regularities of the menstrual cycle? I'm guessing it was perhaps less regular due to variable nutritional intake etc.
And then it's say 8-9 months after sex you may have a baby.
So how did people work out that you can't have a baby without sex but you don't always get a baby from sex?
Does anyone know?

I guess my biggest theory is how much of our "official history" is fiction, especially when you consider the Vatican archieves and other vaults of knowledge ?

The beginning of bread fascinates me. All of it from grinding the flour to mixing with water.

Animals definitely know to look after their babies. But how?
They and babies just seem to know how to suckle their young, yet humans seem to have a whole faff trying to do it. Is it they have a simple life and just do what they need to do to get through the first weeks, while humans have all sorts of other expectations?

And yes I do wonder if they know they are pregnant?

How do Penguins know to keep the egg off the ice? And other birds know to sit on their eggs?

Ooh this is a good point! Very true.
Loving reading all the interesting responses when it's too hot to sleep.

But it took humans an extremely long time to figure out how to start a fire and it was centred around cooking.

Being centred around cooking could be evidential bias though. When you cook you use a fire for a long time in one patch of earth. Nomadic humans would have had a fire continuously burning for days to weeks, this oxidises the soil which is longest lasting archaeological evidence of fire use. But say they used fire for making a dug out boat from a log- that would long have rotted away after a million years and so zero evidence. So we can’t assume fire use was centred on cooking just because that creates the archaeological evidence that lasts the longest.

Its rather like assuming early humans went about naked because all we find are bones….the rest rots away over time.

I love the sun 🌞, but yea, I need a bunker.

Agree that experimenting with food would prove which are poisonous and which aren't but what about people that had allergies there must have been around even in Neanderthal times so one guy eats a crab swells up can't breathe and drop down dead and then his mate decided to give it a go and see if the same thing happens to him

With alcohol , that occurs naturally I would imagine they accidentally left some fruit in a hole somewhere in an attempt to preserve it and then it starts going slightly off and turns into alcohol naturally I bet that was fun the first few times it happened and was here trying to recreate it.
I have seen videos of various different types of wildlife goerging on fermented fruit and getting drunk and idea of a drunk elephant is not a lot of fun the idea of an elephant with a hangover is even less fun !

My post re a good point was supposed to be a reply to LonginesPrime. Not being able to reply to a post properly has not been good for my self-esteem when compared to our ancestors.
I think early humans would have had a good awareness of seasons as changing seasons would have affected food available and shelter needs. However, imagine being there for an eclipse. It suddenly goes really dark in the middle of the day! You can see why people felt this was God(s).

they did it because it felt good, and that's how the species continued, just like in the animal kingdom except most of the animal kingdom dont have sex for fun.

Bread came from beer production iirc. I read a really interesting article on it a while back. www.food24.com/what-came-first-the-bread-or-the-beer/amp/

That's not the article I read but it's still interesting!

Plenty of species do though! www.sciencefocus.com/nature/do-any-other-animals-have-sex-for-pleasure/amp/

Apes do, and they’re closest to us evolution wise. Especially chimps and bonobos. They’re having sex constantly.

Wasps certainly seem attracted to cider/fallen apples for this reason.

More likely they just mashed the grains with water to make gruel. Leave that by the fire and it bakes into a proto-flatbread. From there they'd refine the process.

With babies I'd imagine that ppl always knew, instinctively, since before they'd evolved into humans. But with fire, bread...

My favourite example is an arrow poison reported in a government publication from Tanganyika in the 1950s. In a part of the country where ppl couldn't even afford metal spear heads, they'd make poison by boiling the chopped up branches of a certain plant for several hours on a small flame.

The resulting tar like substance contained an alkaloid so lethal one arrow treated with it could fell an elephant. If you got a speck of it into broken skin you'd be in trouble. Who tf ever worked all this out???

I think what's missing in this is hormones. There would have been a huge hormonal drive for people to have sex. Same with feeding babies there is a natural hormonal response from mother to baby which created the instinct to put baby to the breast.
It's the same in the animal kingdom. Animals instinctively know what to do when they give birth. They know they need to clean off their young. They know they need to feed them. They know they need to protect them. And that's all instinct and hormonal. It's not thought through or rational.

And in our modern world we have become increasingly detached from our instincts. If you look at animals in the wild they would rarely eat something that would be poisonous to them. Because they can sense something in the plant. It's not taught to them. Is suspect early man was the same we would have been able to sense that something would or would not be good for us.

I guess early humans figured out weather quite early on but it must have been terrifying at first. Imagine you were in your cave in the middle of winter when it gets dark at 3pm and wondering if you'd get light evenings again or if this was it. But there would never really be a first time for stuff like dark nights because that would have happened all your life and all your parents lives so ot would have just been - darl earlier is when its colder, fays get longer when baby animals are born, days are longest when sun is hottest, days get shorter as leaves die etc.
Only extreme or unusual stuff - floods, droughts, eclipses would be confusing

If you look at animals in the wild they would rarely eat something that would be poisonous to them. Because they can sense something in the plant. It's not taught to them.
It is actually taught to them. Cows teach their calves which plants to eat as do Ewes with their Lambs. It’s the same in the wild with giraffes and elephants….probably all herbivores. Carnivores teach their young how to hunt/what to hunt and eat and how to fight/defend themselves.

The answer to most of this is hunger.

different types, I grant you.

But if you are starving and find a massive stash of beans or fruit, you’ll eat it. Then maybe look at how to save the rest for another day. It rots. It’s not good to eat any more. How can we save it so it is? What else is available? Soak it in water? Put it on a rock and it dries in the sun. Leave it near fire? Hold it in the fire? It might go soggy, and turn into a mushy substance. It might dry out of cook and turn into a bready or more solid substance. If you leave it a few days some things double in size! Does it taste good like that? Does it make people sick or not? What works, for this item, this fruit, this produce, this kill, this plant. One person finds a good way, shares it, that’s that.

Meat, eggs and milk are easy and obvious, other animals are eating them. When you are starving, taking the food others are eating is a no brainer especially for a predator or scavenger species, we are both.

Why do we have to pick ragwort out of horse fields then? Did they miss the memo?

There’s a theory that people with autism helped drive human evolution which is really interesting to look into.
‘Genetic variants linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may have been positively selected during human evolution because they also contribute to enhanced cognition’.

I think they do as they start to nest in the days leading up to the birth. Bitches will rearrange bedding, throw it out, even rearrange sheets of newspaper in preparation for whelping.

@VanGoghsDog horses will very very rarely eat ragwort. It's only if they don't have anything else that they will ever touch it. Some will eat small amounts as a natural wormer. The real reason to get rid of it is because it spreads so damn fast and takes over which results in their not being enough alternatives.
That said in its dried dead form it does unfortunately become palatable for horses which is when they are most likely to ingest it. But horse in the wild would not come across heavily dried dead baled ragwort!

To a degree yes. But hand reared animals also manage to learn these skills without the guidance of mum

That article reminds me

Oral sex

I assume it would have just been part of evolution to stick a penis in a vagina just like all the other primates but who was the side who first went "actually love, maybe i can shove it in your mouth / oh maybe I'll lick it before i stick it"

Also, snogging.

Hey, lets lick tongues!! Are any other animals as weird as snogging humans?

My favourite fact from The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee is Bonobos having sex face to face for fun